Put Your Hands Up for Detroit Turns 20: The Full Story

Twenty years ago this summer, a Dutch producer few people outside the Netherlands had heard of took a chant lifted from a Detroit twelve inch and turned it into one of the loudest records of the decade. Put Your Hands Up for Detroit was Fedde Le Grand’s breakout single, and by November 2006 it had climbed to the top of the UK Singles Chart and become the record that pulled electro house out of the clubs and into the charts.

Two decades on, the drop still gets played, sampled and stadium tested. Here is what actually happened, checked against the release dates, the chart runs and the credits.

The chant came from a Detroit twelve inch, not from Fedde Le Grand

The hook everyone shouts back is not his. It was sampled from “Hands Up for Detroit,” a 1999 record by Matthew Dear and David Shayman, the producer better known as Disco D, credited together under the alias Daisha. That twelve inch was the first single ever released by the Michigan label Ghostly International, which makes the biggest electro house crossover of the 2000s a direct descendant of a limited run Ann Arbor pressing.

For years, listeners argued about the words. Some heard “I love this city.” Fedde Le Grand eventually settled it on his own site: the sampled line is “put your hands up for Detroit, our lovely city.”

There is a sad footnote. Disco D died in January 2007 at the age of 27, only weeks after the record built on his chant finished its run at number one.

Matthew Dear performing in 2007, co author of the Hands Up for Detroit sample — Matthew Dear performing at Sónar in 2007. He co produced the 1999 original that Put Your Hands Up for Detroit samples. Photo: Miurihausen, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How Put Your Hands Up for Detroit reached number one in the UK

Flamingo Recordings put the single out in the Netherlands on 26 June 2006. It peaked at number four on the Dutch Top 40 and number five on the Single Top 100, solid rather than spectacular. The rest of Europe followed in August, and the track kept growing.

Britain is where it turned into a phenomenon. Before any CD single existed, on twelve inch vinyl and download sales alone, it reached number 53 on the UK Singles Chart and topped the UK dance chart. Data Records then gave it a full release on 23 October 2006. It entered at number two, selling 46,000 copies in a week, and climbed to number one the following week, on the chart dated 11 November 2006. It held the top spot for a single week before Westlife’s “The Rose” took over, and it finished the year among Britain’s best selling singles of 2006.

Fedde Le Grand on air in September 2006, the year of Put Your Hands Up for Detroit — Fedde Le Grand on air in the Netherlands in September 2006, weeks before the single’s full UK release. Photo: iDJ Bryan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A video set in Detroit in the year 2027

The clip did as much work as the record. Directed by Marcus Adams and produced by Lara Schachat, it is set in Detroit in 2027 and staged inside a Kubrick styled laboratory where technicians assemble androids and test each one by stripping in front of it. The first has a meltdown. The second ignores them and flirts with a doctor instead, a cameo by Fedde Le Grand himself. The third passes, then works out that he is a machine, escapes, and gets shut down by remote command.

Two cuts circulated, a regular daytime version and a late night edit with extended footage. Neither was shot anywhere near Michigan. The production took over the vacant former Safeway headquarters in Hayes, west London, using its old mainframe room as the android lab. The fictional 2027 the video imagined is now next year.

The remixes that carried it into every room

Part of why the track went everywhere is that it arrived in several shapes at once. Claude VonStroke turned in the Packard Plant remix, named for Detroit’s most famous ruin. TV Rock and Dirty South delivered the Melbourne Militia mix, DJ Delicious and Till West took it harder, and Soul Central pulled it back toward vocal house. There were also versions featuring verses from Bizarre and King Gordy of D12, which handed the record back to actual Detroit rappers.

That spread is what separated it from a novelty. It worked for tech house DJs, big room programmers and radio at the same time, and it set the template for the electro house wave that ran through the late 2000s. For more records that shifted the genre’s direction, see our rundown of the tracks that changed house music forever.

Fedde Le Grand playing Sensation in 2009 after Put Your Hands Up for Detroit — Fedde Le Grand at Sensation in the Amsterdam ArenA in 2009, three years after the single. Photo: Gzen92, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Twenty years later the drop still lands

The record never really left. Madonna folded a sample of it into a remix of “Music” on her Sticky & Sweet Tour. Detroit adopted it as civic property: the Red Wings play it before the opening period, the Tigers have used it at Comerica Park after home wins since 2010, and the St. Louis Cardinals went as far as commissioning a version with their own city name in the chant.

What keeps it alive is the source. Fedde Le Grand did not invent the phrase, he amplified a Detroit producer’s tribute to his own city and sent it around the world, which is close to how house music has always travelled. Detroit’s role in that story runs deeper than one crossover hit, as the life of John Jammin Collins shows.

Two decades on, drop it at 1am and the room still reacts exactly the way it did in 2006. Put Your Hands Up for Detroit has outlived the trend it started, which is usually the only test that matters.